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Automated emails are ideal for:

  • Onboarding emails (eg. an email flow that sends after 7, 14 and 30 days)

  • Reactivation emails (eg. an email to users that haven’t been active for more than 30 days)

  • Promoting certain actions (eg. an email to new users that haven’t joined a group yet)

Publishing an automated campaign means that the email will be sent to a user once they match the criteria for this campaign after publishing. We will check the filters every hour. Users will only receive the automated email once during the lifetime of an automated campaign (so not every time they match the criteria).

Note that automated campaigns automatically complete after 365 days, which means that they will no longer send out automated emails. 30 days before the campaigns complete, we’ll show you a notification on the Email Campaigns overview when they will complete. Follow the steps at the bottom of this article on how to reactivate completed or expiring automated campaigns.

Creating an automated email

  1. Select the Email Type

  • Select Automated as the email type

  1. Create the email itself

    • Create a subject for the email (max. 256 characters)

    • Create the body of the email

  2. Select recipients

    • You can apply one or a combination of the following filters:

      1. Primary role

      2. Custom role

      3. Last activity

      4. Registration date

    • You need to apply at least one filter before you can publish the automated campaign

    • Note: We automatically exclude all users that unsubscribed from email campaigns and that have non-existing email addresses.

    • Note: You’ll notice that you currently cannot select a Segment for automated campaigns. Since this is more complex (eg. what should happen if you update the segment for a live campaign), we’ve planned to add this in the near future. 

Examples

Onboarding email

Onboarding emails are emails that are typically sent out at various stages of your user’s lifecycle, all of which are meant to demonstrate value and drive engagement. 

To make sure that an email goes out to new users 7 days after they registered, you need to:

  • Create an automated email campaign.
  • Create an email message that, for example, highlights next steps on the community, areas to engage with or a piece of content that’s proven to resonate well with new users.
  • Select the Registration date filter and set it to More than 7 days ago (in plain human: send out this email once they pass this threshold)

Reactivation email

Reactivation emails are typically sent out after a specific period of inactivity. This period can of course differ per community, but the goal is to remind them of the value your community adds while you’re still on their retina. That’s why you could consider starting with a reactivation email after 30 days, and increase or decrease that duration as you learn more about your audience.

To make sure that an email goes out once a user hasn’t been active for more than 30 days, here’s how to set that up:

  • Create an automated email campaign.
  • Create an email message that, for example, reiterates the value of your community and has a clear and appropriate call-to-action (eg. asking a question in a specific category, viewing recent product updates, checking out new events, etc.)
  • Select the Last activity filter and set it to More than 30 days ago

Completing an automated email

In order to stop an automated email from sending, you can click the Archive button. This will complete the campaign and archive it. Note that completed campaigns cannot be resumed.

Extending an completed/expiring automated email

Automated campaigns complete after 365 days, after which you will need to:

  1. Archive the completed/expiring campaign
  2. Duplicate the completed/expiring campaign
  3. Make necessary changes to the email content and triggers (optional)
  4. Publish the duplicated campaign

Editing an automated email

If you want to make changes to an active automated email, you will need to complete the current campaign, duplicate it and make your changes there. This will allow you to better compare and contrast the effectiveness of the changes in terms of success metrics.

 

 

 

@timcavey Good question. The difference between one-off campaigns and automated campaigns is that in one-off campaigns, you’ll select the recipients (who will receive it once you hit Send), where in automated campaigns, you’ll select triggers (which will trigger emails once a user matches the criteria after publishing). In other words, it will not go out to users that currently match the criteria, only to users once they match the criteria after you publish it.


OOOOooohhh this is super important to know!

When I created an onboarding email (send out to users 1 day after signing up) I picked the criterium “Registration date = More than 1 day ago”

Then I thought it would send out to everybody who matches the criteria, aka almost all members (instead of, correctly, everybody *the moment* they start matching the criteria) so I went on and created a workaround with dummy ranks, custom roles assigned, etc. to exclude or include older users from the campaign :D

But the good news is that this won’t be necessary for my next automated campaigns.

Does this functionality still exist? When I navigate in control > emails, I only see the default out of the box emails (@ mention, account approved) - and unsure how to create an automated email campaign.

What I’m hoping to do is create a monthly digest email to go out to everyone -- sharing top articles (most responses, likes) so that people can see what types of conversations are happening. Is something like this possible to create??

Hi @ChristineTT 👋,

I just enabled this functionality on your community 😁

Sweet thank you @olimarrio  - had thought I was going crazy trying to find this!

Question re: editing. I literally need to edit one word in an email campaign I created. 

Instead of saying “get better” I wrote “getter better”.

 

Am I not able to make that simple edit without completing the campaign, then duplicating?

Hi @chjones05 - if the email is still a Draft you should definitely be able to edit it.  You need to click on Edit in the Create email section.  

Oh no, it still seem that we cant send automated emails to segments?

If this is true this makes segments and automated emails pointless for us. Using just criterias like Registration date and Last activity date isnt enough. If it is easier for you to add new criteria: Number of posts, combination of those three criterias works for us:

  • Registration date: Less than 30 days
  • Number of post: Less than 1
  • Last activity date: More than 3 days

Thanks.

Hey @revote - sorry for getting to this one late!  It is indeed currently not possible to send automated emails to segments.  I’ll ask our Product team for an update on that.

 

@Kenneth R We are planning to use this feature to send an automated email when a custom role is assigned (we changed their username to match our standard).  We want to ensure this message goes out only once per user. Based on the discussion above, it is unclear to me whether users who have already been assigned a role will receive the message once the campaign is published (i.e. if you want to send a message to people who already meet the criteria, you use a one off campaign, then use an automated campaign triggered by future role assignments).  Has the bug discussed above been fixed, or should I make sure nobody is assigned the role before the automated campaign is published?

Also, if we want to validate that the emails are going to the right users as intended, is there a way to report on or export a list of users who were sent emails based on an automated campaign?

​​​@jennyweigle 

Also, if we want to validate that the emails are going to the right users as intended, is there a way to report on or export a list of users who were sent emails based on an automated campaign?

After you have sent the email, when opening it from Control you can check the stats and there you can see who has got the email, who have opened it and so on. There is no option to export the list. 

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